Bob:

After two hectic days on shore, I needed a calm, relaxing day at sea in part to unwind and in part just to get caught up on necessary tasks. We had not slept that soundly as the ship had been moving about a bit in the middle of the night, and as a result we slept in late, at least for us. But we still managed to have a nice relaxed breakfast before our first activity, a presentation on "The Life and Times of a Ship's Pilot" by Captain (and long-time pilot) William Wells. After working as a pilot for 25 years in many different areas of the world, Captain Wells could speak with authority on both the preparation for being a commercial ship pilot and his experiences guiding ships into different ports. He was an excellent speaker, which is an unusual talent, and his eloquent and dramatic presentation surely helped make the material interesting. The inherently complex and occasionally dangerous business of guiding rather large ships into rather small docks became quite fascinating.

Right after Captain Wells' talk we ran back aft to the Fusion Lounge, which I think had the largest dance floor on the ship. There Rebecca taught us some basic salsa steps. As she succinctly put it, salsa is like cha-cha-cha, just without the cha-cha-cha, and as weird as that may sound to the Gentle Reader, it really did help me, at least, get into the swing of things (No pun intended!). In 45 minutes we learned the basic step, the underarm turn, the cucaracha, and the New Yorker step, which I would have called a twinkle-type step. I was lucky we had previously learned some of the basics on a previous cruise, so this was mostly review and I was holding my own aside from my perennial inability to catch the rhythm of the music. Actually, I usually catch A rhythm; unfortunately it is just not THE rhythm implied by the original composer! I may not march to the beat of my own drummer, but I certainly seem to dance to him, whereas Monika with her background in music hears the composer's intended rhythm. This is not an issue when we are simply listening to music, but when we must coordinate our actions according to the rhythm it really does create problems, sometimes major ones! Still we had fun and I crushed Monika's feet only once or twice during the lesson, which I declared a moral victory.

Monika:

Bob:

After that exhausting workout, we rested in the cabin where I worked for an hour backing up the pictures from Belfast and stitching together the panoramics until it was time for lunch. Because we weren't exercising as much as on the days when we wander around cities for hours on end, I was trying to eat lightly and had mostly cereal and milk for breakfast and fruit and vegetables for lunch, and that had the side benefit of not producing a carbohydrate crash in the afternoon. Thus I was wide awake for the musical session on Rogers and Hammerstein given by Marlene and Chet Solender. Marlene was still recovering from some kind of cold or sore throat, which occasionally affected her voice, but it was a thoroughly professional rendition of songs from the great Rogers and Hammerstein hits like Oklahoma, Carousel, South Pacific, The King and I, and The Sound of Music. It really is wonderful to have a excellent pianist and singer give focused presentations on specific composers like that, and we particularly enjoyed the tidbits of capsule biography that Marlene interspersed between each of the songs so that by the end of the session we really had both the life sketch as well as concrete examples of their work to remember.

Although we could have taken an art class (lots to do aboard the Crown Princess!), we decided to take the rest of the afternoon off, and Monika updated her journal while I continued reading "The Little Balloonist", a novel based on the life of Sophie Blanchard, the world's first female aeronaut, by Linda Donn. I only knew the very basics about Sophie Blanchard's career and tragic end as a balloonist, and I liked the fact that the book filled in many of the details of her personal life, but I had to wonder, of course, how much of that information was based on historically validated fact and how much of it was sheer fiction. I suspect that most of it was fiction, but to find out for sure I would have to read a real, honest-to-god biography of Madame Blanchard.

Monika: